Endocrine Society Preview: The 2018 meeting will be ‘a journey to innovation’

(FRONTLINE MEDICAL NEWS)– Attendees at the upcoming Endocrine Society annual meeting in Chicago can expect many of the scheduled sessions to be practice changing, according to Ann Danoff, MD, clinical chair of this year’s meeting program.

“It’s going to be an absolutely fabulous program. I always encourage clinicians to attend the plenaries to see where the field is going. And we are going big.”

Endocrine Society President Lynnette K. Nieman, MD, will lead off the plenary sessions on March 17, by presenting awards to six visionary investigators. Noteworthy among these will be the work of Diana Lynn Blithe, PhD, National Institutes of Health, for her research on male contraception. Dr. Blithe will speak about what’s in the clinical pipeline and what direction future research will take.

The second plenary session has an intriguing title – Rhythm and Blues. This session will cover circadian rhythmicity, which is, coincidentally, the research area of the three joint winners of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

In a plenary sessions scheduled for March 17, at 3:00 p.m., the topic under discussion will be the issue of circadian rhythm and metabolic health. Dysregulation of light and dark exposure puts people at risk for a variety of metabolic disease, said Dr. Danoff, who is chief of the medical service at the Philadelphia Veterans Affairs Medical Center. Specifically, two of the presentations – one on Circadian Rhythms, Blue Light, and Setting Your Internal Clock and the other on Improving Health by Time-Restricted Eating – are likely to be enlightening.

The Endocrine Society has revamped this year’s approach to sessions on guidelines to take the format of a discussion of how the guidelines affect patients on case-by-case basis. The moderator of each session will not be a member of the guideline-writing committee, but the panelists will be committee members.

New guidelines to be discussed are those dealing with gender incongruence and testosterone therapy. The session on transgender issues in endocrinology will take place on March 19, and is entitled Endocrine Treatment of Gender-Dysphoric/Gender-Incongruent Persons: An Endocrine Society Clinical Practice Guideline. The session on testosterone therapy is entitled: Testosterone Therapy in Men with Hypogonadism: An Endocrine Society Clinical Practice Guideline, also on March 19.

Another change to the approach taken to guidelines are sessions that go beyond the guidelines to discuss patients who fall between the cracks. Topics of these sessions are osteoporosis, indeterminate thyroid nodules, and challenging hyperprolactinemia and prolactinoma cases The panels involved in these discussions may include a surgeon, and two-thirds of them will include a fellow. “I am committed to the bringing along of young trainees,” said Dr. Danoff.

And what is an annual meeting without a few debates? On March 18, there will be a debate on Debate: This House Believes that Adrenal Vein Sampling Has a Major Role to Play in the Management of Patients with Primary Aldosteronism. Speaking in favor will be William F. Young Jr., MD, of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and against will be Paul Michael Stewart, MD, of the University of Leeds (England). Another debate topic, scheduled for March 17, will be The LDL Limbo: How Low Should You Go? Taking up the side that Benefits of LDL Reduction Are Continuous and Extend to Extremely Low Levels will be Steven Nissen, MD, of the Cleveland Clinic. There to discuss Lower LDL Is Better but What About Very-Low LDL? will be Henry N. Ginsberg, MD, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York.

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